


This Isn’t Everything You Are

by BeaArthurPendragon



Series: I'll Light Your Way Home [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vietnam, Americanized Spellings of Certain Russian Names, Amputee Bucky Barnes, Angst, Angst and Feels, Blanket Permission, Bucky Barnes Feels, Comfort, Death in the Family, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family Drama, Family Feels, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Moving On, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Past Relationship(s), Protective Steve Rogers, Veterans, Vietnam War, Wakes & Funerals, War Veteran Bucky Barnes, because reasons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-17 11:53:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18964705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaArthurPendragon/pseuds/BeaArthurPendragon
Summary: Wounded Vietnam War vet Buck Barnes is going to college in New York on the GI bill and deepening his relationship with fellow vet Steve Rogers when his father's death brings him back home to Indiana. When he gets there, he’s forced to confront the difference between his war and his father's war head-on, and reconcile with the family, the life, and the woman he left behind.You do not need to read the first two fics in the series to understand this one (though it helps).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Snow Patrol's [This Isn't Everything You Are](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Gljs8Y3Q8).
> 
> I really wanted to explore Buck's relationship with his family, especially his father, and delve more deeply into his conflicted feelings about his military service. This is definitely a big turn from the previous fics in the series but I'm wanting to start to fill out their world more...because yeah, I've got plans for more. ;)

_December 1, 1969_

“You should’ve seen the other guy,” Buck says, more cavalierly than he feels, experimentally wiggling his fingers beneath the bag of ice Steve had placed over his sore hand. Nothing broken, he can tell, but he’ll probably have a nice bruise come morning.

“Where’d you get him?” Steve asks, unbuckling Roz’s harness and easing the prosthetic arm off his left shoulder.

“Clipped his jaw, I think,” Buck says. “Got him in the nuts, too. That felt good.”

Steve chuckles, though Buck can tell he doesn’t find it all that funny.

The fight had been a stupid one, but one he’d been spoiling for since he arrived at Empire State University the year before on the GI Bill. At 27, he’s eight years older than the rest of the sophomore class, with two years in Vietnam under his belt, a prosthetic arm named after Rosalind Russell, a Purple Heart, and a Bronze star he’s never told anyone about.

Suffice it to say, he’s got no patience for the Ivy League student activists protesting a war they don’t know a goddamn thing about. Buck thinks the war’s bullshit too, but at least he earned his perspective the hard way—all these kids know about it they learned from _Life Magazine_.

And he can ignore a lot—being called a baby killer, being told he deserved to lose more than his arm for what he did over there—but even he hadn’t become cynical enough to stand by while the kids decided the most effective way to change the course of the war they hated was to set fire to the ROTC building on campus. What they don’t understand—what they would never understand—is that even bad wars are usually fought by good men.

Or that’s what he tries to tell himself, anyway.

Sometimes it even works.

So yeah, he’d thrown a punch; the kid had grabbed Roz, Buck had panicked and punched him in the groin to make him let go, and that ended it fast. Except that the kid hadn’t let go of Roz right away, and when he buckled over and stumbled back, he’d given her a good hard yank as he fell, leaving her hanging limp and useless at his side.

“You keep any replacement parts around?” Steve lifts an already-fraying end of loose cord up for him to see. “Looks like you snapped a cable.”

“Both of them, I think,” Buck says glumly. “The hooks are dead, too.”

Steve swears softly and locates the other loose cord and deems it too fine to splice. “I don’t suppose we can jerry-rig something to get you through the weekend, can we?”

“No, don’t mess with her. I’ll make an appointment at the VA on Monday,” Buck says. “And don’t worry about me. I can manage for a few days.”

“I know you can,” Steve says, placing the dead arm on Buck’s tiny kitchen table between them. “You want to talk about it?”

“He deserved it,” Buck says flatly. To be honest, it had felt pretty damned good to know he could still get the better of someone. “I’m not sorry.”

“Buck.”

Buck scowls and slides his hand out from under the ice pack, taking the dripping bundle to the sink to drain. “You want some coffee?” he asks to make nice, spooning the grounds into the percolator before Steve even answers, because he already knows he’ll say yes. Steve’s a security guard on the graveyard shift at the Red Hook shipping terminal, and Buck had hated to wake him up when he called this afternoon, but his fingers had been too stiff after the punch to get Roz’s buckles undone and honestly he didn’t know who else to call.

It’s been three months since Steve first took Buck home after work one night, and they’d been together ever since. He’s never met anyone like him. Courtly, sensitive, and artistic, Steve has a calm steadiness about him, as if there’s no situation he can’t handle, and in bed, Buck’s been delighted to discover, that translates into an unflappable curiosity about the many permutations of pleasure available between two men.

They’ve never labeled what they have—they don’t call it dating, don’t call each other boyfriends—but he’d known in his bones that it meant he could call Steve for help and that he’d roll out of bed on four hours of sleep and come all the way up to the Upper West side from Brooklyn without question.

Buck’s just setting the mug of coffee on the table when the phone rings, and he sighs. He knows he should have stayed for the police to arrive, but he was afraid that if he’d stuck around any longer, he would have hurt that boy a lot more than he already had. Still, there were plenty of people who could have identified him.

He braces himself and then answers the phone.

“Jimmy?” his sister Rebecca says, her voice shaking, and Buck’s blood turns cold.

* * *

As best as anyone could tell, George Barnes had a heart attack while feeding the pigs that afternoon. He’d died instantly, Becky says, but he’d lain out there for nearly three hours before Buck’s mother got home from her job at the library to find his half-frozen body lying next to the trough. If there was any blessing at all, it was that he’d died on the outside of the fence because if he’d been inside the pen, it was unlikely that there would be much of his body left to bury.

The whole of Moscow, Indiana, would likely turn out for the funeral, Buck thinks, for though George was a lousy farmer, he’d been a good, well-liked man—a deacon at church, president of the local VFW, Boy Scout troop leader—and a decent husband and father, too. George wasn’t an affectionate man, but Buck had always gotten along well with him before their falling out, and in his more reflective moments Buck would admit that all he’d ever wanted to do was make his dad proud.

And now all Buck can think about is how badly he’d failed.

Steve leaps into action, taking the phone from him and ordering Buck to pack and change into traveling clothes. Buck doesn’t question it, just goes into his bedroom and does as he’s told, only vaguely aware that he can hear Steve calling the bar to let them know that he won’t be able to come into work this weekend, calling airlines about evening flights to Indianapolis.

Meanwhile, Buck packs his things carefully and methodically, grateful that the added complication of folding his clothes without Roz requires just enough concentration to keep him from falling apart right then and there. He packs too much—shirts and sweaters and corduroys and jeans and the new dark gray suit he’d splurged on that summer and the navy tie because it’s the soberest one he owns—and when he’s done he has to put a knee on his suitcase to buckle it shut.

He’s just pulling on a fresh shirt when Steve comes into the bedroom to inform him he’s found a direct flight leaving in two hours, but his hand’s shaking so hard he can’t button it.

Wordlessly, Steve steps forward and buttons it for him, planting a small kiss on his forehead when he reaches the top. He gathers Buck’s loose left sleeve in his hand.

“Pins?” he asks.

Buck nods toward a dusty dish of diaper pins on the dresser. He almost never uses them anymore—he hasn’t left the house once without Roz since the day he got her, and at home he usually just knots up his sleeve to keep it out of the way. But he can’t get a coat on over that, and Steve knows it.

Steve carefully folds Buck’s sleeve up and pins it at the shoulder, then plucks and smooths it so it lies neatly over his stump. Buck turns to look at himself in the mirror to inspect Steve’s work, disoriented a little by the sight of it. There’s no hiding Roz’s hook—no pretending that arm is real anymore—but at least with her he’s still got two of them. She’s nowhere near as good as a real arm, but he can do most everything he needs to with her, and knowing he has to go out into the world—to go home to bury his goddamn father—without her feels like going into battle with an empty gun.

“Thanks,” Buck says, surprised by how strangled his voice sounds. And then, balling his hand into a fist: “Fuck.”

“Hey,” Steve says, reaching for him and drawing him into a hug. “Come here.”

“Don’t,” Buck says, backing away because he can’t bear to be hovered over right now. “I mean, thank you, but I have to—I just have to get home, okay?”

“Okay, Buck,” Steve says softly. “Whatever you need.”

* * *

It’s only Buck’s third time flying and his first trip on a civilian plane. He finds it unexpectedly pleasant in a banal sort of way—just a bunch of ordinary citizens on an oversized bus casually overcoming the laws of physics to get where they need to go. It’s oddly soothing.

He tries to distract himself by rereading the Hemingway novel he needs to write a paper about for his American Modernists final, but his eyes keep sliding aimlessly over the words and out the window, lingering on the bright speckled spatter of cities and towns and the smaller flecks of farms gliding past below them in the darkness.

His father had worked so hard to keep the tiny spark of their own farm alight, somehow managing to break even most years but never able to get enough ahead to make the kind of improvements or hire enough people to help the operation grow into something profitable. All he needed was one really good year, he liked to say, but the good years never came. And then the very bad year came, and that was the year they never did manage to recover from. In one of the last conversations they had before Buck reported for duty, when they split a bottle of Jim Beam on the back porch after his last dinner at home, he admitted that he wished he could have stayed in the Army, that he’d always been a better soldier than a farmer.

George had enlisted after Pearl Harbor, knowing full well it might be the last time he saw his wife of less than a year, that he might never meet the baby she was already carrying. He spent the next three years in North Africa and Italy before being transferred to France and Germany for the last 11 months of his war.

He would have stayed in the Army after the peace if frostbite hadn’t claimed most of the toes of his left foot toward the end of February of ’45. Instead, he’d come home with nightmares and a limp to a wife whose voice he’d forgotten the sound of and a son he’d never met, and tried to remember exactly what it was he’d been fighting for. He got to work on making a daughter and took over his father’s farm the year after that.

He never spoke of his time at war, but three times a year—Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veteran’s Day—Buck’s father and his buddies from the VFW put their uniforms back on and marched in the parades before regrouping at the veterans’ cemetery outside of town with their rifles to honor the men who’d died in service to their country. The town would gather to watch the men fire a three-volley salute while one Boy Scout from the high school lowered the flag to half-mast and another squeaked out Taps on a trumpet. As a child, Buck loved to watch his dad get ready for these parades, watching in rapt awe as his father solemnly buttoned up his jacket and straightened his service pins, and for most of his childhood was convinced his father was the reason they’d won the whole war.

Sometimes when his father wasn’t around, he’d sneak into his parents’ bedroom and put on his father’s service cap, balancing it carefully on his little head so it wouldn’t fall over his eyes, and stand up straight as he could in the full-length mirror so he could practice his salute. (His father had taught him how—shoulders back, chest up, chin out, elbow at 45 degrees, wrist straight, hand flat, thumb tucked.)

He’d planned to join the Army himself after high school—motivated equally to live up to his dad’s legacy and to get his queer ass the hell out of southern Indiana—but that was the year a tornado tore the roof off the pig barn and killed almost half their stock. So he’d stayed home instead, thinking it would only take a year or two to help his father rebuild. Five long years later, they were still in the red and Buck had made peace with the fact that the farm would always have to come first when he got his letter from the Draft Board.

He’d talked to his father about requesting a hardship deferment on account of the farm—and God knows one look at their ledger would have been all he needed to get it—but his father wouldn’t hear of it. With deadly seriousness, he told Buck it was an honor and a privilege to serve one’s country, that duty always demanded sacrifice, and that if it meant he’d have to shoulder more of the load at home while Buck was away, it was a small price to pay.

Of course, it wasn’t until he got to Vietnam that he came to understand how much of the virtue of war had just been rationalization in disguise. It was true he had witnessed acts of bravery and heroism that no one at home would ever truly understand, but those bright flashes of humanity were easily swamped by the relentless waves of blood and brutality that threatened to drown them all.

And, well, if duty demanded sacrifice, she sure got one.

When he got off the plane from Hawaii in California after his discharge—his stump still bandaged, his leg still a little numb from the surgery on his spine—he discovered that his father had taken a bus all the way to Los Angeles to meet him so he wouldn’t have to fly the rest of the way home alone. George had tried, not all that successfully, to conceal his shock at Buck’s appearance, but the only thing he said about it out loud was a gruff joke about them having matching limps. Buck was grateful for that—he didn’t want to talk about it and wasn’t sure he ever would, and going out for a supper of burgers and milkshakes before turning in early to drink cheap bourbon and silently watch the Cubs on the fritzy television in their motel room was exactly what he needed.

That night, though, he’d woken with a start around three to the faint sound of crying, and simultaneously realized that his father’s bed was empty and that the sound was coming from the bathroom. It was too much to bear, knowing his father was sobbing on the other side of the wall, so Buck had pulled on a t-shirt and shuffled painfully out to the balcony to smoke cigarette after cigarette until he heard his father go back to bed. Neither one of them spoke of it in the morning.

And for months afterward, he gravitated to his father’s silence as a way to escape his mother’s incessant fretting over him. Most days, he just followed his father around like a duckling as he did the chores to build back the strength in his weak leg, doing what little he could to speed the work, only speaking as much as was necessary to get the job done. But sometimes they would talk, in the quiet of the barn when the pigs were out, and George would tell him a little about his war and Buck would tell him a little about his—the good parts, mostly, the funny moments in camp and the close calls they could laugh about later. Only once, not long after Buck got Roz and was still learning how to use her, did George speak of the grief he’d felt when he first saw his foot after the frostbite had been cut away. Buck had said nothing in reply because there was nothing that could be said that they both didn’t already know, but it had made him feel a little less lonely about it all the same.

They had fallen out slowly over that spring, between the day Buck realized that he was never going to be able to return to farm work and the day George finally accepted it. By the time he did accept it, it was too late—his denial had seeped too deep into the cracks and pores of their bond to repair.

What George never did accept was Buck’s decision to go to a fancy private college in New York when the state university at Bloomington was perfectly good, and so much closer to home.

And Buck had made the mistake of telling them the real reason why: that he’d never wanted to stay in Indiana to begin with, and that the GI Bill was his best ticket away from a life he’d never intended to lead. By the time Buck boarded the bus for New York that August, the resentment was so thick between them that he and his father could barely look each other in the eye.

Buck hadn’t been home in the year and a half since, not even for holidays. He called home once a month, but had only spoken to his father a handful of times, mostly to reassure him that school was going well and that he had enough money. The last time had been Thanksgiving, a week and a half before.  

He wonders which cluster of lights is Moscow, which tiny spark down there is the farm. How long it would take to go out, he doesn’t know.

He’s pretty sure it won’t take long.

* * *

Buck’s little sister Becky picks him up at the airport, and by quarter after eleven, they’re pulling up to the weathered two-story house they’d grown up in. A faded and mildewed yellow ribbon still flutters on the big tree out front, first tied there when he was shipped overseas. Why his mother never took it down, he doesn’t know.

There’s a strange car parked next to his father’s truck in the yard and most of the lights are on.

“Who else is here?” Buck asks.

“I don’t know. Martha Phillips was here when I left,” Becky says, taking Buck’s suitcase from him. His back’s starting to scream from the fight and the long day of travel, and there’s not enough chivalry in the world to help him object. “Come on,” she says. “Everything’s more or less exactly where you left it.”

When he steps on the bottom stair to the porch and hears the familiar squeak, it feels like he never left. The last time he felt time vanish like that was when he’d come home from the war, and a jolt of pain judders through his back and down his leg as if to remind him that it wasn’t really all that long ago.

He grits his teeth and adjusts the strap of his backpack, and presses on.

“Momma?” Becky calls as they drop the bags in the front hall. “We’re home. Jimmy’s here.”

Buck hears a light quick step approaching—decidedly not his mother’s—down the upstairs hall toward the stairs, and Buck’s heart pauses when he realizes it’s Natalie Romano.

“Hi Jim,” she says softly as comes down the stairs. She’s hardly changed in the five years since he saw her last—her hair is still as vibrantly red as ever and there’s still a puckish glint in her eyes as she spots him.

They’d begun dating their senior year of high school, and even after she moved to Bloomington for college, Buck would drive out on Saturday nights, where they’d go to the movies or go dancing or anything else that caught their fancy. He didn’t mind kissing her, but the rest—well, he’d tried, he really did, because the things he wanted seemed impossible, and he knew he wasn’t getting out anytime soon. He’s not sure how convincing the act was, but if she was disappointed, she never let on.

His reprieve came during her junior year, when she met Alex Schuster. Alex was handsome and charming and intelligent, a licensed pilot and cadet major in the Air Force ROTC, and honestly, neither one of them could keep their eyes off him.

Alex was a kind man, one who respected Natalie’s wit and intelligence, who rightfully understood she would always be twice the man he could ever hope to be. And it was good, and they were happy, but that didn’t stop Natalie from calling Buck one night and offering to marry him instead. She was a little drunk and Buck knew it, but the offer had itched in his mind a lot longer than it should have because he knew she meant it.

He knew they could never give each other what they needed, but he wondered how bad it would be if they tried. They’d always had fun together, at least, and that was more than a lot of couples ended up with. And it wasn’t like there were men lining up to suck his dick in southern Indiana. At least with her he wouldn’t be alone.

But she deserved more than just not being alone, and he knew it.

Alex and Natalie got married in June of ‘65. Alex had already been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Force by then, and instead of a honeymoon, they’d packed up their car and moved to Texas. It was the last time Buck saw her.

Until now.

She pauses at the foot of the stairs, her eyes briefly ghosting over his left shoulder before reaching out to hug him. She’s not wearing her ring. “Hey, stranger,” she says.

“Nat,” Buck says, holding her tight and kissing her cheek. “You’re back.”

She nods but doesn’t elaborate. “She’s upstairs. Dad gave her a pill, so she won’t be awake much longer. We can talk afterward.”

“She moved back after her husband died,” Becky says softly as they climb the stairs. “He was killed in the war. I thought you knew.”

“Oh,” Buck says, for some reason feeling more grief for Natalie’s loss than his own. “No, I didn’t know.”

Buck tries not to look at the family photos lining the wall on the way to his parents’ bedroom—the football and ballet photos, the birthday parties and the graduation pictures—but he stops for a moment in front of one taken when he was about nine years old, and Becky just four. It had been an unusually good year and Buck’s father had surprised the family with the only vacation his family ever took. They’d rented a cabin on a lake in Michigan, and to Buck it had seemed like the ocean—he’d never seen water that big. For one glorious week, he’d just run himself ragged in the sun till he burned red, swimming till he wrinkled like a raisin, hunting bugs in the woods until he was polka-dotted with insect bites.

On their last day there, his father had posed the family in front of the water and set the timer on his camera so they could have a souvenir. Becky was squalling and his mother’s eyes were closed and his father was reaching up to catch the fisherman’s hat a gust of wind had knocked off his head with a sneeze-like grimace of surprise on his face and Buck was silly-faced, his eyes crossed and tongue out and making bunny ears behind his sister’s head. They’d laughed so much when they saw it that they’d decided to frame it.

“Jim,” Becky says softly, urging him forward.

Winnie is sitting on the side of the bed in her nightgown, her book of Gospels open on her lap. Buck freezes for a moment in the door: His mother looks as though she’s aged a decade since he saw her last and from the slackness in her jaw he knows she’s already half-stoned out of her mind.

“Momma?” Becky says softly to get her attention. “Jim’s here.”

“Jimmy,” Winnie says blearily, looking up at him with a dazed smile. Whatever Dr. Romano had given her was strong. She reaches vaguely toward him. “Come let me see you.”

“Hi, Momma,” he says, leaning forward to kiss her. “I’m so sorry.”

“He didn’t suffer,” Winnie says, then reaches out to take his hand. “That’s all we can ever ask for.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Buck agrees.

She finally manages to focus her eyes on him. “Where’s your arm?”

“In the shop for a tune-up,” he says.

“Maybe we can borrow another while you’re here,” she says faintly, and behind him Buck hears Becky swallow a surprised giggle.

“Let’s get you in bed before that pill starts to work, Momma,” she says. “We’re both staying here tonight. You come find us if you need anything, all right?”

Winnie nods. “All right. Yes,” she says, looking around the bed. “I think I should rest a while.”

They help her into bed and tuck her in, taking turns to kiss her on the forehead before turning out the light, as if they’re the parents and Winnie their child. She’s snoring gently by the time they pull the door closed.

“We got anything to drink in this house?” Buck mutters as they head back down the stairs, and Becky laughs softly.

They find Natalie in the kitchen, washing dishes. There’s a half-full bottle of Jim Beam on the table and she nods toward it, inviting him to help himself. He doesn’t want to wrestle with the ice tray in front of her so he pours three glasses, neat, and hands them around.

“To the old man,” Buck says, and they drank.

Becky glances back and forth between Buck and Natalie and then clears her throat. “It’s been a long day. Think I’ll turn in.”

“’Night, Becky,” Natalie says. Then, to Buck: “There are some sandwiches in the fridge if you’re hungry.”

He suddenly realizes he’s starving—he hadn’t eaten since lunch, and it’s nearly midnight. He piles a few on a plate and Natalie joins him at the table while he eats.

“Thank you for doing all this,” he says.

“It’s nothing,” she says, waving his gratitude away. “I know what it’s like.”

“Becky told me. I’m sorry.”

Natalie flashes a tight smile. “We were in Texas so long we were starting to think he wasn’t going to be invited to the dance, but he finally got his orders in May. Didn’t last three months, it turned out.”

“I knew a boy who didn’t last three days,” Buck says, realizing even as he’s speaking that it’s cruel to one-up her like this. He can’t even remember the kid’s name, just how surprised he looked when the bullet went through his throat. He’d been younger than Becky. Still had zits on his chin.

“But you came home,” she says, gesturing toward him with her drink.

“Most of me did.”

“Enough of you did,” she says, kicking him lightly under the table. “Self-pity doesn’t suit you.”

“It’s gallows humor, Natalie. There’s a difference.”

“Can I ask you something?” she asks. “Do you regret going?”

“I don’t know,” Buck says honestly. “Sure as hell wouldn’t go back, though.”        

“He was proud of you, you know?” Natalie says. “Every time I saw him at church he’d go on about how hard you were working in New York, how busy you were studying that you didn’t have time to visit, how you were going to be the president of a big company one day.”

Buck swallows. “He did not.”

“I wouldn’t lie about that.” Natalie carries her glass to the sink to wash. “He thought the world of you.”

“He might have thought to say something about that.” He refills his glass and pushes his plate away. Natalie leaned over and hugs his shoulders from behind.

“He did,” she says, kissing the top of his head before reaching around to take his plate to the sink, too. “He told everyone who would listen.”

A few minutes later, he follows her out onto the porch as she leaves, and lights a cigarette as he watches her pull out and turn down the long drive toward the road. He reaches up to his chest reflexively as he’s been doing all night to run his thumb under Roz’s harness, and shakes his head. Roz is heavy and uncomfortable and only good for half of nothing, but Christ, he feels naked without her right now.

He shivers coatless against the cold but doesn’t go inside—instead, he goes out into the front yard and looks up. After a year and a half in New York, he’s forgotten just how many stars the sky can hold. The bigness of the sky, the emptiness of a landscape devoid of any other buildings besides the hulking dark of the pig barn and, almost on the horizon, the lights of the Phillips house, feels like drowning.

Steve’s already at work by now, but Buck wishes he could call him, thinks he could use a bit of that steadiness right now. He wishes he’d let him give him that hug. Wishes for a lot of things, to be honest. Wishes he could be here somehow, while he’s at it.

He flicks his cigarette out into the gravel of the driveway and goes to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up, Buck learns a secret about his father's military service, and confronts some hard truths about his own.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buck learns a secret about his father's wartime service.

He sleeps fitfully until a nightmare wakes him in a cold sweat around five. Despite his exhaustion, he knows there’s no point in sleeping—the pigs don’t care that Dad’s dead, and someone needs to feed them. That much, at least, he can do.

He dresses quickly in yesterday’s clothes and jogs lightly down the stairs in his socks to get Dad’s galoshes and barn coat—still redolent of his aftershave and his cheap cigarettes—then lets himself out the back door and heads across the paddock to the barn. It’s frigid today, and a few flakes of snow are already starting to fall. His stump aches fiercely from the cold, but he presses on across the field. Dad’s galoshes are a little too big and his feet slide around inside them. The frosted grass crunches beneath his feet.

The stink of the barn hits him hard from yards away, and as he gets closer he can see that the building is in even worse shape than it was before he left, with broken windows and the siding falling down and badly patched holes where the wood beneath had rotted away. When he goes to open the door, it swings unsteadily on rusted hinges, and his heart sinks because he sees that the pigs are already being taken care of by Chester Phillips next door and his sons. The Phillips farm is three times the size of theirs, with state-of-the-art equipment and five full-time employees to help with the work.

“Hi, Jim,” Phillips says, taking his hand. “Hell of a loss. Your dad was a good man.”

“Yes, sir,” Buck says, trying to swallow his shame as the degree of disrepair begins to sink in. Christ, they are fucked. “Pigs doing all right this morning?”

“Better once they’ve had their breakfast,” Phillips says, and he tries to make it sound like a joke, but a quick look around confirms that the animals aren’t as fat as they’re supposed to be. Not too thin, thank God, but he could tell Dad had been skimping on the feed this year and he knew Phillips could, too. “The boys are gonna look after the pigs till you and your momma settle things, all right? Don’t you worry about that.”

Buck doesn’t tell him that the pigs are likely to fare better under the care of the Phillips boys than they ever did under his dad. “Thank you, sir,” he says.

“You go on, now,” Phillips says, nodding toward the door. “Go look after your momma. She’s missed you.”

When he gets back to the house, he heads straight for the shower, grateful that he’d be getting the first of the hot water. Between the fight, the flight, and his uncomfortable childhood bed, he feels as stiff and sore as an old man. He lets the water pound into his back for a while, and when he feels good and scalded, turns it off and remains in the steam until it dissipates, too.

The heat of the bathroom concentrates his dad’s scent into its four essential elements—Dial soap and Old Spice, Listerine and Ben Gay. He takes his father’s can of Barbasol out of the medicine cabinet and squirts a pile of it into his fingers, but one whiff of the shaving cream is enough to make him rinse it off. His beard can go another day.

His mother’s in the kitchen rolling out biscuits in her dressing gown when he comes back downstairs.

“What are you doing up, Ma?” he asks, ducking in for a kiss before pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“It’s Saturday,” Winnie says, reaching a floury hand around his back to hug him. “We always have biscuits on the weekends.”

“I think we’d be fine with toast under the circumstances, Ma,” he says, leaning into the hug. She kisses him again and then scrubs her fingers over his chin.

“You need help shaving, baby?” she asks, and not for the first time Buck marvels at his mother’s ability to somehow infantilize him in the most matter-of-fact ways.

“No, just lazy today,” Buck says tartly, disentangling himself to pour some coffee and change the subject. “Saw Mr. Phillips up at the barn this morning,” he says. “Said Stan and Jack would look after things for the time being.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Winnie said, feeding the pan of biscuits into the oven and slamming it shut with more force than was strictly necessary. “Chester’s been offering to buy this place since you deployed.”

“He has?”

“Jim, we both know your dad couldn’t save this farm on his own, and we both know he was going to work himself to death trying anyway—and Chester knew it, too,” she says, peeling a few strips of bacon out of the package and placing them into a skillet. “I told your father to take it, but he wouldn’t hear of it, especially not after you went to New York. He always wanted you to have it. And now you do.”

“What?”

“The farm’s yours. He never updated his will after you got hurt. It’s yours.”

“Ma, I never—”

“It’s all right, baby boy,” Winnie says, and Buck can tell she sounds more resigned than confident. “I know you’ll get a good price for it.”

Buck’s not so sure that a good price exists for the place, but he keeps his fears to himself. “How long has Natalie been back?” he asks instead.

“Since June, I think?” Winnie says. “Terrible about her husband. At least she’s still young enough for a second chance.”

“Momma,” Buck groans. It’s not the first time they’ve had this conversation. “Alex was a good man. Don’t disrespect him.”

“I’m not,” Winnie protests, dishing the eggs and bacon out onto a plate. “What ever happened between you two, anyway? Daddy and I were so sure you two were going to get married.”

“Alex and I dueled for her hand. Pistols at dawn. He won.”

Winnie snorts and reaches back to ruffle his hair. “They not have barbers in New York?”

“Nope. Hippies burned ‘em all down,” Buck says, plucking a fresh biscuit off the pan. “Anything else you want to rag me about?”

“You like it there, Jim?” Winnie asks, sitting down across from him with a cup of coffee. “Are you happy there?”

“Yeah,” Buck says, suddenly aching for Steve’s touch, for the solid warmth of his body beside him. “I think city life agrees with me.”

“You don’t think you’ll come home, then?”

“I don’t know,” he says. Then, because there’s no point in lying: “Probably not.”

“Probably for the best,” she says, looking out the kitchen window toward the barn. “I don’t suppose there’s going to be anywhere for you to come back to for much longer, anyway.”

“We’ll always take care of you, Momma,” Buck says, reaching across the table and taking her hand. “Becky and me—you’ll never have to worry, okay? I promise.”

“I know, baby boy,” she says, squeezing his hand. “We’ll make do. We always have.”

* * *

Winnie manages to make it through breakfast but has her first breakdown of the day when she has to pick out a suit to bury her husband in. She wants to bury him in his uniform but she can’t find it and suddenly she wonders if they’d ever picked it up from the cleaners after the Veteran’s Day parade.

“What about his black suit, then, Momma?” Becky asks. “We can still put his pins on that. It’ll look real nice.”

“No, call the cleaners and see if it’s there, baby,” Winnie says, panic filling her voice.

“They’re not open on the weekends,” Becky says gently. “It’s Saturday.”

“Then call Donny Schneider at home and make him look!”

Becky glances desperately and Buck shrugs. She sighs and goes downstairs to the phone.

“It wouldn’t be in the storage closet, would it?” Buck asks, a Hail Mary if there ever was one. But, because he really doesn’t want them to have to drag poor Mr. Schneider into his store on a Saturday to look for something they’re almost certain isn’t there, he goes down the hall to the small closet by the bathroom where Winnie’s wedding dress and Becky’s old prom dress hang alongside the Santa costume George wears for the town Christmas parade.

And there, lo and behold, wrapped in paper and plastic, is a familiar length of olive drab.

“Hold up, Becky,” he calls down the stairs. “I found it, Ma.”

He carries the bundle into his mother’s bedroom and lays it out on the bed to unwrap. She tears the plastic and the paper away and goes pale.

“That’s not his uniform, Jim,” she says softly, and even as she’s speaking he realizes his mistake. “It’s yours.”

He’d worn it exactly once, for his induction portrait, and then he’d never seen it again. Honestly, he’d forgotten he even still had it. “Think he’ll fit into it?” Buck asks, because he can’t think of any better use for it. “I don’t need it anymore.”

He doesn’t even see his mother’s slap coming.

“How dare you?” she hisses. “Wearing that uniform is a _privilege_.”

Buck touches his cheek, feels his skin burning beneath his fingers. “You’d change your mind if you saw the things I did,” he says softly.

“And _you’d_ change _your_ mind if you saw the things your father did,” Winnie says, roughly pushing him aside and storming out to the stair landing. “Rebecca! Did you reach Donny?”

“I found it, Momma,” his sister calls up from the front hall, and Buck wants to kiss her. “It was in the coat closet.”

“I’ll take it to the funeral home,” Buck offers—partly as a peace gesture but mostly because from the top of the stair he can see the first of what he knows will be dozens of visitors over the next few days bearing food and platitudes and awkward questions about his arm coming up the drive. He doesn’t even wait for his mother to answer before he jogs down the stairs.

“I’ll drive,” Becky adds quickly, following Buck’s gaze out the window and marking the Ford station wagon pulling up in front of the house. And then apologetically to Winnie: “It’s not like he can drive a stick shift with one hand, Momma.”

“I can—” Buck starts, but stops when Becky glares at him with a _please get me the fuck out of here before I have to deal with the church ladies_ look. “Thanks,” he says gamely. Then, under his breath: “Don’t ever do that again.”

Becky doesn’t have time to apologize—she’s already opening the door to admit Edith and Miss Louise, Winnie’s best friends from church. The women hand Becky a foil-wrapped casserole and flock immediately to Buck, who’s just reaching for his coat.

“Jim!” they exclaim, pulling him into hugs he doesn’t want and patting his long hippie hair disapprovingly and complaining that he’s too thin and asking him if he’s met a nice girl yet, and he endures this as politely as he can, but when Edith goes to fix the popped-open safety pin holding up his sleeve, his hand flies up and he just barely has the presence of mind to use it to cover the faulty pin instead of punching Edith.

“Momma’s upstairs,” he says gruffly, pitching his voice a little lower and pulling up to his full six feet to remind them both that he’s no longer a child they can manhandle at will.

“Winnie!” Louise calls up the stairs as she begins to make her way up. “We’re here!”

“Becky, let me take care of that,” Edith says, bustling after Buck’s sister into the kitchen. “You fix your brother’s sleeve.”

“Jesus Christ,” Becky mutters as she comes back out to the hall for her coat. “Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

How many dead bodies has Buck seen in his life? He’d tried to keep count during the first few months of the war, as if his ability to assign a number to the mortality he witnessed—to the deaths he himself dealt—was somehow proof that that life still mattered. But once you got into the double digits, exhausted and hungry and bug-bit and so fucking hot you could barely breathe, you lose track. Maybe you always lose track, once you pass ten, a dozen, fifteen. Maybe once you lose the ability to count the dead, you join them in a way. He had no idea anymore. No idea at all.

Ted Robinson—the undertaker—had tried to dissuade Buck from seeing his father on the slab, before he was dressed and the makeup applied, but Buck had insisted with an intensity that had made the man visibly flinch. So he’d gamely let Buck follow him downstairs into the embalming room, where his father lay beneath an avocado-green sheet on a metal table.

To say his father looks old is entirely beside the point. He looks dead. Sure, his hair is whiter and wispier than it had been the last time Buck had seen him, and his skin dryer and more deeply wrinkled, but he can barely process that because the entire right side of his face is bruised nearly black from the blood that had pooled on that side of his body during the hours he lay undiscovered outside the sty.

Buck’s glad he can see him like this. People should know what death looks like. He reaches out before Ted can stop him to place his hand on his father’s brow and he’s shocked by how cold he is.

“Jesus, Pop,” Buck breathes, jerking his hand back. And then: “I’m sorry.”

Sorry for what, he has no idea, really. Not being the son his father wanted, he supposes. For not being able to be.

 _He thought the world of you_ , Natalie had said. _He told anyone who would listen._

I’m sorry I didn’t listen,” he amends softly, wiping his eyes and swallowing back a little bubble of grief.

He stumbles past the undertaker and leans against the wall, the cinderblock cool against the back of his head.

Tears are streaming down his face. He’s not even sure when they started, but he notices them now. He slides down the wall, tucking his knees up close to his chest, and rests his forehead against his arm. He doesn’t even know who he’s crying for anymore—his dad, Davy and Murph, the kid whose name he couldn’t remember, the kids in the village, maybe even himself, though he never has before—but when he finally stops he realizes Ted is squatting in front of him.

“He’s all right, son,” Ted says softly. “He doesn’t feel it. I’m going to make him look real nice for your momma.”

“It’s not that,” Buck says, though he’s not sure what it is, either.

“I know,” Ted says, standing up and holding out his hand. “But it’s all I can give. God’s taking care of the rest. Trust in that.”

He’d given up on God a long time ago, but he accepts Ted’s hand and hauls himself up, ignoring the zing of pain shooting down his leg. Then he crosses back to his father, takes one last look at his true face, and leans down to kiss his forehead.

* * *

They kill as much time in town as they plausibly can. They get a long lunch at the soda shop, with milkshakes for good measure, and then Buck goes to the barber while Becky peels off in search of warmer stockings for the funeral.

Old Johnny recognizes him immediately and there are several of his father’s friends waiting their turn, so Buck endures another round of sympathies and handshakes and thanks for his service, and then he asks Johnny for a crewcut and a shave before he can think twice about it. When Johnny finally wipes his face clean and sits him up to look in the mirror, he sees a face he hasn’t seen in three years. Thinner, maybe, and harder, but it’s still him.

He reaches up to scrub the stubble at the back of his head, and it reminds him of Steve’s.

* * *

Back at home, Buck manages to avoid the church ladies by sequestering himself in his father’s office, going over his ledgers. He’s prepared himself to accept that things are worse than they were when he left for war, but it’s not until he digs into the books that he realizes how bad it really is. If they’re lucky, if Chester’s still willing to pay what he offered three years ago, they might walk away with just enough to buy Winnie a new house in town. Maybe.

If they’re very lucky, and Chester lets her stay in the house, she might even have a little cushion to see her through her old age. Maybe.

He stands and begins to pace, furious at his father for not telling him how much trouble they were in, but also knowing in the same breath that there wasn’t a damn thing Buck could have done to help.

 _You should have swallowed your fucking pride and sold when you had the chance_ , Buck raged at his father. _What the hell were you thinking?_

He sits back down at the desk and begins to go through the drawers—looking for what, he didn’t know, maybe an unclaimed lottery ticket—when he finds the key to the safe.

The safe doesn’t have much in it that surprises him—the deed to the farm, his parents’ marriage certificates, the kids’ birth certificates, a few pieces of his mother’s jewelry, a couple hundred dollars in cash—but there’s also a shoebox tightly bound with twine.

He sits on the floor next to the safe and leans against the wall, dragging the box around to his right side so he can work the knot loose, not for the first time wishing he had Roz around to help. But he finally manages to get the string off and gingerly open the box.

It’s full of letters—old, dry, yellowing letters written in fading pencil on the crackly onionskin used for air mail during his parents’ war.

_Dear Winnie, it’s only been a week since I got here but it already feels like a lifetime._

_Dear George, the baby kicked for the first time today. I think it’s saying hello._

_Our ship leaves for Oran in the morning. I hope I don’t get seasick!_

_I’ve won our bet. The first crocus of spring was purple, not white._

_I’ve never seen so much sand in my life. I daresay it's ruined my appetite for a beach vacation._

_You have a son, my love. He’s perfect. I named him James, as you wanted._

Buck lets out a ragged breath and then sifts through the letters—there must be nearly 50—and begins to choose them at random. He can hear more people coming and going, but nobody bothers him.

_Today we saw our first combat, if you could call it that._

_Jimmy looks more and more like you by the day._

_We are leaving for Italy the day after next to join the 107 th. _

_Today in church we discovered Jimmy’s learned how to swear from your father._

_I had a close call but am all right, though I have a nice scar to add to my collection._

_Please be safe. We love you. We are all praying for you._

_I’m sorry it’s been so long. We are in France now._

_I’ve started working at the library. Jimmy is quite in love with all the books!_

_We have reached the German border. It will be a while before you hear from me._

_Here is a photograph of Jimmy’s second birthday party. He didn’t like the clown._

_My darling, today I believe I saw the worst thing a man could ever do to another._

Buck’s hand begins to shake so hard he drops the letter, but he forces himself to pick it up again. If his father could live it, he tells himself, he can read it.

_Dear Winnie,_

_My darling, today I believe I saw the worst thing a man could ever do to another. We had been making our way across Germany, clearing a portion of this forest, when we began to notice a smell of death so powerful one might have thought the entire world had died a week ago without our knowing. We wrapped our scarves and handkerchiefs—whatever we had—around our mouths and noses and pressed on to discover the source, as we heard rumors of mass graves. Presently we came upon a wide clearing and found a large camp of prisoners in such a starved and ragged state that we would not have believed them to be alive had they not been somehow standing and speaking to us._

Bucky puts the letter down to wipe his eyes and catch his breath, wishing desperately he had a drink to fortify him to read the rest.

There had been almost a thousand people crammed into the small camp. His father described how the dead lay in drifts all around, the survivors too weak to bury them, and how even in winter the smell of decay threatened to choke them all. A Jewish boy from Boston happened to be in their unit and he was able to speak to the prisoners in broken Yiddish—enough for them to explain what had happened to them, that their captors had abandoned them the week before with no food and only snow for water, but that they were too weak to leave and while some of the stronger prisoners had decided to try their luck in the forest, most could only wait in the hopes of rescue.

There was not much his father’s unit could do but call back to headquarters for help, and this they did. They stayed with the prisoners for two days, burying as many dead as they could, scrounging up as much food as they could from the homes and villages nearby, but it was nowhere near enough to make even the slightest difference. Eventually a Red Cross convoy arrived and his father’s unit was ordered to move on.

_God help me, Winnie, I know many of our enemy are just men like me doing what they are told, but this was the Devil’s work. There is no other explanation for it._

Buck sets the letter aside and lets out a few deep, broken breaths. His 22 months in Vietnam had left him no stranger to human misery, but for him it had been a slow accretion by ones and twos, with occasional dozens when the fighting was especially thick. What his father had encountered surpassed comprehension. How do you go home again after seeing that? How do you kiss your wife and hold your son and feel like the world is place you want to bring another child into?

And yet there was Becky, proof as much as anything else that life goes on.

The grandfather clock in the hall chimes five o’clock, and Buck realizes with a start that Steve’s probably awake by now—he always gets up early on Saturdays to take care of all the daytime things he sleeps through during the week. Before Buck can worry about how he’s going to explain a long-distance call to New York when the bill comes next month, he’s sitting at his father’s desk, lifting the phone and dialing his number.

“Steve?” he says, ashamed of how small his voice sounds.

“Hey, pal,” Steve says, and Buck eyes start to water again, because he’s finally figured out that _pal_ is just Steve’s word for _sweetheart_ when they’re not in bed. “Hanging in there?”

“I guess,” Buck says, turning in his chair to look out the window. It’s begun to snow in earnest finally, and he’s profoundly grateful that the Phillips boys are the ones out there taking care of the pigs in this mess. He catches himself reaching up to rub the back of his head again. “I just—wanted to hear your voice.”

“Want me to tell you about my day?”

“Yeah,” Buck says softly. “That sounds nice.”

* * *

Buck decides not to tell his mother about finding the letters. He carefully puts them back in the box and reties the twine and replaces the box in the safe. He’s just making a note in the ledger about two past-due bills when Becky knocks on the door and lets herself in.

“What’s the damage?” she asks, leaning in the doorway.

Buck just shakes his head.

“Mr. Phillips will give us a fair price,” Becky says.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Buck says.

“We’ll be all right,” Becky says, giving a resigned shrug. She nods down the hall toward the sitting room. “Your absence has been noticed. Momma’s asking for you.”

“Don’t the bereaved get an excuse note?” Buck asks, but he’s already standing up because he knows the answer.

“No,” Becky says. “Natalie’s here, by the way.”

He sighs and unconsciously searches across his chest with his thumb for Roz’s harness, then double-checks the pin on his sleeve to make sure it’s still secure. Becky watches him do this, then meets his eyes and gives him a quick, reassuring look. But it does little to soothe the ferocious anxiety crackling across his nerves right now—all his grief and anger and disillusionment and fear and secrecy and surprise and confusion and self-consciousness and loneliness swirling together into a vast electrical storm of shame he can’t quite locate the source of.

He takes the long way to the sitting room through the kitchen in search of a drink, and is relieved to his bones to discover a six-pack of beer in the fridge. He cracks one open and drinks a third of it standing in front of the sink before he feels calm enough to face his mother and the church ladies. And Natalie.

Christ, he hates the idea of her seeing him like this.  

The sitting room falls silent as he enters. The flock of church ladies has expanded to five, plus Natalie. Martha Phillips is sitting next to Winnie on the love seat, and she glances up to meet his eyes with an anxious look Buck can’t decipher.

“We don’t have to discuss it right now, Winnie,” she says softly to his mother, patting her hand. “The offer still stands whenever you’re ready.”

His mother looks pale as milk. “Thank you, Martha,” she says in a quiet voice that Buck immediately recognizes as rage, that tells him exactly what they’d been talking about. “It’s kind of you to say.”

Buck takes another long pull from his beer. “Really, Martha?” he says, fixing her with a hard stare. He doesn’t bother to lower his voice. “My father’s not even in the ground and you’re asking to buy our home?”

“No,” Martha says primly. “I was reassuring her that she didn’t have to worry about what would happen to the farm now.” As if her implication isn’t already clear, her eyes drift to Buck’s left arm.

Buck feels his face go hot and he points toward the front door. “Reassure her later.”

“Now, Jim—” Louise says, rising and holding out her hands in a placating gesture.

“No,” Buck says angrily. “The farm is mine now. You want to buy it, you tell Chester to tell me to my face what he thinks it’s worth, do you understand? Not send his wife to low-ball my mother in her time of grief like a goddamned coward.”

There’s a gasp from Natalie that Buck recognizes as an aborted laugh, and that gives him courage. “Get the fuck out. I mean it.”

Everyone in the room gasps and his mother cries out in dismay, but Miss Martha simply takes a deep breath and composes herself well enough to rise. “Of course you’re upset, Jimmy, dear,” she says. “I’ll be by later in the week, Winnie.”

Buck’s mother doesn’t say anything, just locks eyes with him in silent rage as Martha takes her leave.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper, Momma,” Buck says gently, his rage dissipating almost instantly once he hears Martha pull the front door shut behind her.

“What were you thinking?” Winnie cries. “Do you honestly believe Chester’s going to raise his offer after you’ve just insulted his wife?”

“I couldn’t just let her—”

“Yes, you could have, and you should have.” Winnie leans forward and puts her face in her hands. “You’re just like your father.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Neither one of you ever knew a damned thing about what this family needed!” Winnie shouts. “Why didn’t you take the draft deferment?”

Buck steps back in surprise. “Excuse me?”

“You knew we were in trouble. You knew we needed you. Why didn’t you stay?”

“Dad wouldn’t—”

“Your father was an idiot, Jim,” Winnie snaps. “And you were an idiot to listen to him. And now just look at the mess we’re in.”

Buck forces himself to pause by taking a deep breath. “What exactly are you accusing me of, Momma? Serving my country? Getting hurt? Trying to make something of myself by going to a good college? I didn’t make Dad hang onto the farm. I didn’t make him work himself to death.”

“You know he blamed himself for what happened to you, don’t you? And when you decided to move to New York he was convinced it was because you blamed him too.” Winnie’s begun to weep in earnest now. “None of this would have happened if you’d just stayed here where you belonged!”

“Momma!” Becky cries. “None of this is Jimmy’s fault.”

The church ladies finally burst from their stunned silence as well, but Buck doesn’t stay long enough to hear what they have to say. He storms out to the back porch, slamming the door behind him, where he lights a cigarette. He wishes he’d thought to grab his coat, but it doesn’t matter. The cold feels good, the pain of it in his stump and in his spine anchoring him to the Earth in a needful way, and he forces himself to relax into it as best he can, letting it seep into every pore he has. The sun’s setting and the snow is starting to come down hard, and it’s so, so quiet compared to New York. It’s unsettling.

He concentrates on the burn of the tobacco in his throat, the scrape of it across the surface of his lungs, scouring his panic away. Because his mother was right, even if she was being unfair—if he’d stayed, the farm might have become profitable again, his father would have worked less, he might have lived longer, and Buck would have been able-bodied enough to work the farm he’s just inherited instead of having to get rid of it at a fire-sale price.

But it hadn’t been idiocy that had compelled George to refuse to let Buck petition for a draft deferral. After all, the Soviets were as bad as the Nazis, and after what he’d seen of Nazis, a few more years in the red must have seemed like the easiest price in the world to pay to keep that kind of evil from spreading through the world.

He flicks the cigarette butt out into the frozen yard and contemplates lighting another—and possibly the merits of simply freezing to death on the porch—in order to avoid returning to the awkwardness. Then the front door opens and renders his agony absolute.

“You know there’s no extra credit in life for suffering, right?” Natalie asks mildly, handing him his coat. She’s wearing hers.

“Too bad,” Buck says, accepting the coat and shrugging it on.

“She didn’t mean any of that, you know,” Natalie says. “She was as proud of your service as your dad was. Martha just upset her.”

“She wasn’t wrong.”

“Neither was your sister. None of this was your fault.”

Buck lights another cigarette. “Sure feels like it right now.”

Natalie plucks the cigarette from his hand and takes a drag before handing it back to him. “Let’s get out of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Buck buries his father and says goodbye to Indiana.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reconciliation, goodbyes, and new beginnings.

O’Neill’s is a popular roadhouse bar a little ways down Route 40, not far from the Barnes’ farm, and when Buck and Natalie arrive they just barely manage to corner a small booth in the back before the Saturday night crowd makes a table impossible to find.

Buck’s grateful for the bustle and noise around him; it makes him feel a little less conspicuous, and he needs something to drown out the sound of his thoughts. It reminds him a little bit of Josie’s in a way—he can tell most of the customers are regulars from the easy way they move around the space, chatting with the bartenders, breaking away from their groups to say hello to others. There are a few people from their high school there that night, but no one either one of them wants to talk to, so they order a pitcher of beer and a basket of fries and just settle into their booth for the night.

There’s a cover band playing classic country songs—not badly, either—and they listen for a while without talking. Buck puts his pack of cigarettes on the table and they both smoke, one cigarette after another as if they could smoke out the swarm of anxiety that’s buzzing around them both.

The band starts in on a George Jones song and Natalie breaks into a sad little smile. “Alex always liked this one,” she says, not quite looking at Buck. “He was my rock, you know? Nothing fazed him. I liked to try to shock him, but he never blinked.”

Buck grins. “Shock him how?”

Natalie shoots him a wicked little grin. “Oh, I got him a subscription to _Playboy_ for his birthday one year, for example. Another time I convinced him to drop LSD.”

Buck laughs. “How was that?”

“Trippy. He turned into great red monster and apparently I was a music box ballerina,” Natalie says, sipping her beer. “He always said, ‘Nat, everything you think makes you weird is what makes you wonderful to me. Nothing you do could ever scare me away.’ God, I loved him.”

“He was a hell of a guy.”

“He was,” she says. She’s giving him a gently intense look that Buck knows means she’s trying to tell him something, but he can’t quite decode what it is. “You ever think about getting married?”

Buck feels his face heat up. “Sure,” he says. “If I meet the right girl.”

“I think we both know that’s never going to happen,” she says evenly.

“What do you mean?” Buck’s heart is pounding so hard he can barely breathe.

“In school you would watch boys the way most boys would watch girls,” she says, so softly he can barely hear her over the band. “You were careful, but I could tell.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did, Jim,” she says, threading her fingers through his, and his heart falters because he knows the gig is up. “But we were so good together I hoped I could turn you around.”

“I think I did, too,” Buck admits.

“And now?”

“I don’t want that anymore. It would be easier, but—I’m happier being myself.”

 She reaches under her shirt collar to take out the gold chain on which her wedding band hangs, and her face softens a little as she closes her fingers around it. “Good,” she says. “I always wanted you to be happy, whoever you ended up with.”

Buck blushes and she squeezes his hand. “Maybe you’ve already got someone?”

He gives a noncommittal shrug that they both know means yes and nods out toward the dance floor. The band is playing Patsy Cline, a slow song they’d both liked back in the day. “Once more for old times’ sake?” he asks.

She grins. “Sure. Why not?”

He leads her out to the dance floor and slides his arm around her waist as hers slides comfortably, familiarly around his shoulders. She rests her right palm flat on his chest in lieu of holding his left hand, and he wonders briefly if she can feel how full his heart is right now. She’d always been the hardest person for him to hide from, the one he hated lying to most, and the vanished weight of his deception makes him feel a hundred pounds lighter.

They both tilt their faces toward each other until their foreheads touch, and when they do, Buck smiles.

* * *

He wakes up with a crushing hangover a little before ten.

He and Natalie had talked late into the night, and he’d found himself telling her things he’d only shared with Steve. He told her about the three Jims, how they’d all had to use their middle names on the radio so people could tell them apart, and how the other two died within weeks of each other—one quickly and one badly, over three gut-shot hours, before the Medevac could arrive to cart his body away. He told her about the village near Cambodian border where they’d accidentally mortared dozens of civilians because of bad intel, and about going in and finding bodies of children among the dead. There had been a baby in one house, not even a year old.

And he told her about that stupid day outside Hue when he managed to catch, barehanded, a Viet Cong grenade before it landed in the middle of their camp and took out most of his team. He told her how he watched his arm vaporize before he could throw it back, how he could still remember the smell of burning flesh and the awful crunching sound his bones had made as the explosion wrenched his body backwards. He told her about how the force had cracked the bones in his spine and left him so numb and weak he couldn’t walk or hold his piss for more than a week until the swelling subsided and the nerves began to work again.

He told her how he endured it because he never thought he had the right to complain about it, not after everything he’d done, and he told her how he still believed he deserved it even now.

Then he told her about his father, about the letters he’d found, about the concentration camp he’d liberated. He told her how proud he was of him for that, and that he wished he’d had a chance to tell him so.

And then she’d taken his hand and told him that his father probably wished he’d had a chance to say the same thing to his son, for being brave and staying good, even during a bad war. Especially during a bad war.

It’s the same thing Steve said to him on the phone earlier and he wants to believe it—he does. But he doesn’t. He’s not sure he ever will.

And then he’d come home and found everyone already asleep, but found hanging on his closet door two different suits: The gray one he’d brought from New York and the service uniform he’d only worn once, a lifetime ago.

The uniform’s a little loose, but it still fits, and as he dresses, the oddest feeling comes over him: even though he’s only worn it once before, it feels completely natural to put it on now. He’s not sure why he’s doing this, exactly, only that it’s just a few days before the anniversary of Pearl Harbor and it feels like the right thing to do. He’s doing it for Dad, he supposes, and maybe that’s enough.

Becky cries a little when he calls her into his room and hands her his tie.

“Don’t,” Buck says softly.

“You look so handsome,” she says as she threads his tie around beneath his collar.

“I look like an idiot.”

“Daddy would be proud of you,” she says, knotting the tie and gently tightening it.

He doesn’t reply, just hands her the pin for his sleeve.

“Like this?” she asks, folding it up and holding it against his shoulder.

“Yeah.”

She pins the sleeve, and then she pins on his service ribbons, and then she pins on the Purple Heart. But when she goes to pin on the Bronze Star, he stops her.

“Jim,” she says, gently disentangling her hand from his. “You earned it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Someone thought so.”

“Sure, because I saved his life.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“I killed a lot more than I saved, Beck,” he says, realizing as he does that this is the most he’s ever spoken to her of what he did over there, and the admission shames him to his bones. Now even his baby sister knows what he is. “Kids, once. It was an accident, but I did it.”

Becky pales a little at his words, but she places her hand on his chest and looks him in the eye. “I think the fact that you think you don’t deserve it is proof that you do,” she says. “It means the good part of you still outweighs the bad.”

Buck sighs, knowing it’s as futile to try to convince her as it had been Natalie. “I’m not so sure that’s true anymore.”

“I am,” Becky says, kissing him on the cheek and tucking the medal into his hand. “I don’t need this to tell me that.”

* * *

His father’s flag-draped coffin stands out brightly against the clean white snow blanketing the cemetery and the sea of dark coats surrounding it. Despite the cold, nearly 100 people have turned up for the burial, maybe more.

There had been more than twice that at the funeral—most of their church’s congregation, the VFW members and their families, even the mayor. George’s best friend Eddie had given the eulogy, something funny and moving and kind, and by the time everyone filed out of the church Buck was sore from shaking so many hands.

At the graveside, Buck and his sister each read a bit from Psalms and the pastor says some words about Isaiah and reads a bit from John and Corinthians, and then comes the part that will undo him, because the honor guard has arrived from Indianapolis, and the three uniformed riflers are already lined up a safe distance away, and Buck’s never felt like such a fraud in his life before.

The uniform was a sentimental mistake, he realizes—he’s just a little kid back in his parents’ bedroom practicing salutes in his father’s hat, pretending that he belongs to stand among men who fought Hitler. He can feel the Bronze Star freezing in his pocket, heavy as lead, glad he at least had the goddamn humility not to let Becky talk him into wearing it. 

But it’s too late now, because the riflers are raising their weapons and Buck is squeezing his hand into the tightest fist he can so he doesn’t flinch when they fire, because if he does, they will know what a phony he is.

He flinches. He flinches every time.

It’s freezing cold and he’s not wearing a coat, and he starts to tell himself that he’s just shivering, but he knows he wasn’t.

Then the bugler begins to play Taps, and Winnie and Becky both begin to sob. Natalie catches his eye from off to the side and places her hand over her heart and he gives her a little nod, then takes his mother’s hand while Becky slides her arm around his waist and leans against him, and Christ, he’s missing Steve with an ache that threatens to double him over.

It takes forever for the honor guard to fold the flag, fold after fold after fold, and all Buck wants to do is bug out of there, tear off this ridiculous costume and go back to New York where at least everyone sees him for exactly what he is.

And yet, when the honor guard presents the flag to Winnie, Buck finds himself standing at attention, and when they salute the family, he instinctively salutes back (shoulders back, chest up, chin out, elbow at 45 degrees, wrist straight, hand flat, thumb tucked, just as his dad taught him). The honor guard isn’t supposed to react but he can tell they’re all looking at the damned pinned-up sleeve as he does, and all he wants to do is shout at them to stop, that it doesn’t make him a fucking hero.

But he doesn’t. He keeps his face still, he keeps everything still until his father’s casket is lowered and it’s time to start filling the grave. Someone’s handing out roses; Winnie goes first, tossing a rose and then a spadeful of dirt on the casket. Becky goes next, and then it’s Buck’s turn. He drops in the rose and the dirt, and then, before he turns back, he reaches into his pocket and takes out his Bronze Star.

His father had been awarded nothing for liberating that concentration camp, nothing for anything he did during his war, aside from a battlefield commission to corporal after a bit of heavy fighting near Azzano. It’s not fair.

Before he can think twice, he tosses the medal into the grave. It strikes the casket with a metallic clunk and then slides off to the side, but he doesn’t care. It belongs in that hole with his father far more than it belongs with him.

Becky reaches for him as he comes back toward them, but he shrugs off her hand and keeps walking deeper into the cemetery, away from the departing mourners. He’s vaguely aware that someone’s following him, but he doesn’t care. He keeps walking up over the little rise toward the mausoleum where he and some of his high school buddies would get drunk on the weekends, wishing he’d thought to pocket a flask before he left the house that morning.

He’s got smokes at least, and lights one, and turns back to watch the slow dissipation of the crowd from above.

Natalie’s almost gained on him, and when she reaches him she doesn’t say anything at first, just stands next to him and watches too.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, Nat,” he says after a while. “Sometimes it feels like I don’t know what I am anymore.”

“I know the feeling.”

He looks at her, and she’s looking a little ways off to the right, down the hill, at a small cluster of plots beneath a large oak tree.

“That where he is?”

She nods, then wipes her eyes, and as she does he realizes how extraordinarily difficult it must have been to come today, to hear the rifles and the bugles again so soon after burying him.

“Every now and then, out of nowhere, I remember that it’s permanent, you know?” she says. “You get used to telling yourself that you just have to get through one more day, one more day, one more day, and eventually it will start to make sense, but it never does. And I don’t think it ever will. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to reconcile it—I’m just going to have to live with all the questions and contradictions for the rest of my life.”

Buck takes a long drag off his cigarette and unconsciously shrugs his left shoulder, searching instinctively for Roz’s weight. “Thought about what you’re going to do next?”

“A little,” she says. “Might try my luck in Chicago. Too many memories here.”

“You could always come out to New York,” Buck says. “I could show you around.”

“Nah,” she says, placing her hand on his chest, then taps it lightly. “Too many memories here, too.”

“I suppose.” He crushes out the cigarette beneath his shoe and offers her his arm. “Send me a postcard when you get there, at least?”

She doesn’t answer, just tucks her hand into his elbow. “It’s worth it, you know,” she says, her voice nonchalant-but-not, casting one last look back toward Alex’s grave. “Loving someone. No matter how hard it is. It’s worth it.”

* * *

Twenty-four hours later, he’s back home, and Steve is helping him into the tub. He doesn’t need the assistance, but he needs Steve’s touch, so he gratefully accepts his hand as he lowers himself into the hot water and sighs as the warmth begins to sink into his aching back. Once he’s settled into the water, eyes closed and head leaning back against the tile, Steve sets a sweating bottle of beer on the tile near Buck’s hand.

“My dad enlisted after Pearl, too,” he says softly. Buck cracks his eyelids open in surprise—Steve’s never talked about his father before.

Steve flips the toilet lid down so he can sit and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, passing his own beer back and forth between his hands.

He’s not looking at Buck as he speaks; he’s focused on something a hundred yards away, past the wall and probably a lot more. “I’d just turned six, I think? Got sent to the Pacific. Died in November of ’43, fighting for some bullshit little island somewhere.” He shrugs. “By then, he’d been gone so long, I’m not even sure I knew who he was anymore. He was just this—presence that I missed.”

“I’m sorry,” Buck says, but Steve shakes his head.

“No, no—that’s not what I meant,” he says. “I just meant—I think that’s why I joined up. I mean, I _know_ that’s why I joined up. It was like getting part of him back for a while.”

“What was he like?”

Steve exhales hard. “I don’t really remember, but he seemed kind to me. Fun. I remember him taking me down to the alley to play catch, that he couldn’t wait until my hands were big enough for me to throw a football. He was a longshoreman down at the docks and sometimes if a crate broke, he’d come home with a bag of oranges or bananas for us as a treat.”

Buck lets his eyes drift shut again. He forgets sometimes that Steve is just old enough to remember the tail end of the Depression, to remember when fruit was a luxury. “My dad liked oranges,” Buck says. “Had one every night after dinner, no matter how bad the farm was doing. Said it helped him keep things in perspective.”

“Sounds like a smart guy.”

“He did his best,” Buck says, realizing as he says it that he believes it, too. “He would have liked you.”

“You think?”

“Oh, yeah. He’d have dragged you out to the porch with a bottle of Beam and traded war stories all night long.”

Steve gives a soft laugh. “One of those, huh?”

Buck grins, eyes still closed. “One of those.”

Buck feels Steve take his hand, his thumb tracing soft circles against his palm. It feels good, the hot water, Steve’s touch, the sour taste of warm beer on his tongue. For a brief moment, he wonders what would happen if he kept the farm, if he and Steve moved out there and took it over, but the thought evaporates almost immediately. His mother was right: Letting the place go was for the best.

His life is here now.

“How about I get some dinner started?” Steve leans forward and kisses his hand, and then starts to stand.

“No,” Buck says, gripping his hand tight. “Could you stay?”

“Yeah, pal,” Steve says, settling back down. “I’ll stay as long as you want."

**Author's Note:**

> Moscow, Indiana, is a real place! Near Shelbyville! Also, Alex Schuster was the best Americanization of Alexei Shostakov I could come up with.
> 
> Comments give me life! xoxo
> 
> I also do the thing at [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea).


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